Now, with Crossroads, his sixth novel, the first of a planned trilogy, the transformation is complete. The Corrections (2001), Franzen’s third, best-selling novel, which rocketed him to literary superstardom, represents a hybrid, mid-way point, a “softened DeLilloism”, as the critic James Wood put it, the Lambert family centre-stage but containing “leftovers” from his prior ambition to write a “social-realist masterpiece”. The influence of his father, “who admired scholars for their intellect and their large vocabularies”, marks his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), in which the domestic crisis of the Probst family is eclipsed by a complex conspiratorial plot, evidence of a desire to prove his intellectual seriousness through emulating the smart postmodernists – Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo et al. The trajectory, in Franzen’s telling, entailed a kind of personal growth: from flaunting his cleverness to pursuing emotional honesty, from self-display to self-examination, from exhibiting his knowledge about “issues” to investigation of “the primary psychic stuff inside me”.Īppropriately, Franzen describes this evolution as a familial, indeed oedipal, psychodrama. Jonathan Franzen’s evolution as a novelist makes for a satisfying story: he has gradually weaned himself off the postmodernist “systems novel” in favour of the realist “novel of character”, given up encyclopaedically charting an entire culture and settled for minutely dissecting a family.
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